One of the favourite blog topics on CAOS Theory blog over the years has been our quarterly and annual updates on venture capital funding for open source-related businesses, based on our database of over 600 funding deals since January 1997 involving nearly 250 companies, and over $4.8bn.

There are still a few days left for funding deals to be announced in 2011 but it is already clear that 2011 will be a record year. $672.8m has been invested in open source-related vendors in 2011, according to our preliminary figures, an increase of over 48% on 2010, and the highest total amount invested in any year, beating the previous best of $623.6m, raised in 2006.

Following the largest single quarter for funding for open source-related vendors ever in Q3, Q4 was the second largest single quarter for funding for open source-related vendors …

There has been no shortage of reaction to HP’s move to make the Linux-based WebOS open source software. Below, I offer some of my thoughts on the meaning for the different players affected.

*What’s it mean for WebOS?
Moving WebOS to open source was best option for HP. It retains some value in the software depending on its involvement. It is also the best fate for the code, rather then being sold or simmered to its IP and patent value or even used as another weapon in the ongoing mobile software patent wars. Still, the move comes amid huge developer and consumer uncertainty for WebOS. Nevertheless, at least WebOS was already in the market with a compelling products, the Palm the Pre, in the modern smartphone market. WebOS will hopefully have a faster path to open source than Symbian since the former is based on Linux. I still think the greatest opportunity for WebOS may be in serving as an …

for some reason, nobody has ever exposed the different rounding methods via mysql’s built-in ROUND() function, so if you want something different, you need to add it via a stored function. the function below is based on the T-SQL version here.

CREATE FUNCTION ROUND_TO_EVEN(val DECIMAL(32,16), places INT)
RETURNS DECIMAL(32,16)
BEGIN
  RETURN IF(ABS(val - TRUNCATE(val, places)) * POWER(10, places + 1) = 5 
            AND NOT CONVERT(TRUNCATE(ABS(val) * POWER(10, places), 0),
                            UNSIGNED) % 2 = 1,
            TRUNCATE(val, places), ROUND(val, places));
END;

use at your own risk. there may be edge conditions where this fails. but this matches up with the python and postgres based system i was crunching data from, except in cases where …

Talend delivers v5. Zentyal raises series A. The TCO of OSS. And more.

# Talend announced version 5 of its data integration suite, adding business process management capabilities via an OEM relationship with BonitaSoft. Yves De Montcheuil explained the name changes in version 5.

# Zentyal closed a series A venture capital funding of over $1m by Open Ocean …

Cloudera raises $40m. Accel announces $100m fund. Rackspace takes OpenStack private. And more.

# Cloudera raised $40m in series D funding and announced a partnership with NetApp around its NetApp Open Solution for Hadoop.

# Accel Partners launched a $100m Big Data Fund to invest in Hadoop- and NoSQL-related vendors.

# Rackspace …

A short while ago I posted an article on the codecentric blog about why good metrics can be, but need not be equal to good software quality. As I wrote earlier, I will add links to this blog whenever I post something of interest to the company site.

The post is available in both English and German at http://blog.codecentric.de/en/2011/10/why-good-metrics-values-do-not-equal-good-quality.

As I promised a week ago, I’m publishing results of my little MySQL survey. Question that people (including me) are probably the most interested in is what variant(s) of MySQL are people using. No big surprise is that the most used variant (89%) is MySQL Community Server from Oracle. It’s well known default, people know what to expect and administrators golden rule is don’t touch it if it works. And other variants build on top of it anyway.
Second place (20%) belong to MariaDB. That is answer I also kind of expected. MariaDB guys are verbose and visible. At least I saw much more people talking about MariaDB then about Percona. Part of it might be that they position themselves as kind of MySQL competitor. Oracle is big controversial company. Sometimes we hate them (they killed OpenOffice!), sometimes we love them …

This is not really a blog post. I just would like to know you opinion on state of MySQL at openSUSE and openSUSE Build Service. But I’m interested in your feedback even if you are not using openSUSE or even if you are not using packages I provide. As my TODO is quite long and I can’t do everything, I would like to know what should I pay the most attention to. Later I will publish a post about the current state of MySQL and how you can participate

Red Hat’s $136m acquisition of open source storage vendor Gluster marks Red Hat’s biggest buy since JBoss and starts the fourth quarter with a very intersting deal. The acquisition is definitely good for Red Hat since it bolsters its Cloud Forms IaaS and OpenShift PaaS technology and strategy with storage, which is often the starting point for enterprise and service provider cloud computing deployments. The acquisition also gives Red Hat another weapon in its fight against VMware, Microsoft and others, including OpenStack, of which Gluster is a member (more on that further down). The deal is also good for Gluster given the sizeable price Red Hat is paying for the provider of open source, software-based, scale-out storage for unstructured data and also as validation of both open source and software in today’s IT and cloud computing storage.

…

Microsoft’s Android revenue. Tizen formation. And more.

# As Microsoft announced its latest Android-related patent agreement with Samsun, Goldman Sachs estimated that the company will make $444m in revenue from Android patent deals for fiscal year 2012.

# LiMo Foundation and The Linux Foundation announced the formation of Tizen to develop a Linux-based device software platform.

# Karmasphere raised $6m in a series B round …